Just How Hurtful Is This 'Color' Thing

Just How Hurtful Is This 'Color' Thing?

Well, guest testimony on the recent "Tyra Show" revealed that people in Chatanooga, Tennessee tried to run down two young Black girls "...because of their color..." Another guest, saying he was 'Black and Mexican' (illustrating the colorism involved in calling some folk by national origin but calling people of color - a color) and that he doesn't like Mexicans (himself). How truly hurtful are both incidents!

Further injury, of course, is Tyra's use of glaringly counterproductive rhetoric (probably stemming from her middle-white-American producers' usage): non-meaning phrases like "bi-racial," "interracial," "race," "raceS,"** "mixed-multi-racial," - all muddying an otherwise educative program on color - not 'race' Tyra! (**There is only one hueman race)

It's obviously way past time for a national debate on racist/colorist language usage; the sooner the better, so that influential folk like Tyra and others don't continue to perpetuate the untreated racism/colorism which so pitifully still rends the fabric of our society.

It is obvious also, despite admitted progress in some areas, that this country remains a 'hostile-to-color' place; examples of this abound and no more illustrative of this ignorance were the statements of many of Tyra's studio guests - like the white mother of two brown children who said, incredibly, that "I don't see color" - and I'm sure she had not a clue that she was therein denying the hueman worth of her own offspring!

Again, like the white mother of a dear friend of mine who told her beautiful Black son, "I hate you!" I can hardly think of a more hurtful situation than a mother actually forswearing the issue from her own body.

I can personally attest to the unfortunate and preventable hurtfulness which is, apparently, inescapably, unavoidably attached to people of color, worldwide, by the way. As the daughter of a Black father and a white mother who has had 'color-buffeting treatment' by multi-colored, miseducated people all my life, when I heard Tyra introduce the misled and obviously - U.S.A.-miseducated filmmaker of "Bi-Racial - Not Black, Dammit!" - I nearly had a blue cat! Give me a freakin' break!

Because of the monstrous miseducation systems - in the entire world, Victoria, not just in the U.S.A.! - which evidently refuses to teach its multi-colored hapless students about themselves - every single one of 'em descendants of the originating Black Afriicans - there still exists, again, worldwide, crass ignorance of self, viciousness (including color-based murders - especially by those suburdd-dwelling cops) toward 'others,' and everyday delivery of color-bigoted hurt.

Isn't it time to acknowledge, address and heal this hurt?

Sure! REMEDY: Start by administering to everyone, the www.racismtest.org* - and when dysfunctional responses to differences in color and culture are revealed, let that individual be referred to Ethnotherapy Counseling until she or he can THINK STRAIGHT about color and culture!

This remedy should be adopted by schools, universities, seminaries, business places, the military, government offices, political campaign organizations, medical institutions, courts systems, prisons - anywhere where hueman beings are making decisions about others.